What are the users adding?
What are the user’s going to add to the Library 2.0 mix?
Reviews is one much touted idea, but who is going to collect these? Talis recently showed that they have been talking with Clare County Library about access to their book reviews and making them available as part of a web service (seen as part of a demonstration for a new version of their OPAC product). They also talked about ways to aggregate reviews from other sources into the same feed.
But how do I make my review available? How do I add my voice to the reviews? (I can do it in amazon, but can I do it at my library with the same ease?)
What we need is a central place that we as users can use to create our reviews. If we review something on our blog, can we tick a check box and have that review automatically sent to a central point? Other people (and lets face it companies) can use that review to add value to their sites or services.
Who owns the copyright? The reviewer who made the review (creative commons). If the original review is always cited, with their name and a link back to their site, then what better pay off than increased site traffic.
Users are not limited to adding reviews.
They could add jacket images for rare books that are in their collection. The community at large could even be presented by a list of ISBNs/Titles that do not have Jacket Images, and could offer their own scans. Something of this sort could be useful for a site like Abebooks. Although to be honest I would prefer a picture of the actual item I was interested in buying. This may also be of especially interest to local history or special interest collections who want to provide images for the older books in their stock.
Tagging, one of the biggest (and sometimes illused) forces in web 2.0 today. I recently saw mention of a contacts book where you could tag the entries. Maybe I’m missing the point, but couldn’t you just file them aplhabetically? Anyway… Why not allow users to tag your library books? Right there in the OPAC, on the work details page where we also show the items available, there could be an editable list of tags that users have proposed for this work.
Maybe they have eventually found something that they considered hard to find, and want to add the keyword or concept that they initially thought the work would be under?
Technorati Tags: Users, Library2.0, web2.0, reviews, library catalogues